


Underneath Your Skin

by romanticalgirl



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Jealousy, Multi, Soul Bond, Soulmates, trope bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-05 01:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16358102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: Steve had a soulmate once, but his mark and his hope for his future was gone when he stepped out of the Vita-Ray machine. When Bucky's soul mark appears, everything changes.





	Underneath Your Skin

“There’s no such thing.”

Steve shrugged and put his feet up on the table. His socks had cartoon Hulks on them, because Tony was an asshole. But they were warm, and Steve didn’t like to be cold. “Thought you believed in evidence.”

“Anything can be manipulated.” Natasha had her feet tucked up under her. She was wearing an oversized t-shirt that Steve was relatively certain used to belong to him. He could see the strap of her sports bra, and her yoga pants were imminently distracting. 

“I used to have a mark. Stepped out of the chamber all smooth skin, unblemished. Gone, just like that.”

“You still had your soul, therefore if you had a soulmate before you would have had one when you came out. It was probably a birthmark.”

“Or the original Steve Rogers died in there, and a whole new one came out.” He shrugged again and took a bite of the candy bar she’d brought him. “Bucky’s got one.”

“Bullshit. I’ve seen _all_ of him.” She probably didn’t mean for it to hurt, but it did a little. Steve had always been jealous of the people who got a chance to have a piece of Bucky he never would.

“He didn’t before. Does now.” Steve chewed his bottom lip, then ran his thumb along it. “It’s on the back of his right arm. Look for it the next time you spar with him.” He got up from the couch. “Thanks for the candy bar.”

**

He was there when she saw it. When she froze for just a second, just long enough for Bucky to make a move that brought her down to the ground. She lay underneath him, not moving, and Steve could barely see the slight rise and fall of her chest. 

“You give?” Bucky asked, jerking back and off of her as Natasha slapped him across the face. She said something in Russian that Steve didn’t understand and then stormed out of the room. Bucky looked confused, glancing up at the observation room where Steve was. He must have seen something on Steve’s face because his expression closed off and he turned around on his heel, leaving the room.

**

He remembered the first time he saw it. He and Bucky had been for a run and Bucky had pulled off his shirt as he headed for the shower. Steve had frowned for a moment until he recognized the shape. Something had twisted in his stomach, and he must have made a noise, because Bucky turned around and looked at him. He’d asked what the matter was, and Steve couldn’t manage to say a word. 

Bucky’d looked over his shoulder and seen it, and he’d stopped and stared before going into the bathroom and staring at the reflection in the mirror. Then he’d closed the bathroom door. The shower hadn’t started, which meant he was still looking. 

Steve had gone to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, staring down at the web of flesh between his thumb and his pointer finger where his mark used to be.

**

Natasha left on a mission. Bucky stopped talking to everyone. After a few days, Steve got on his bike and started riding, no destination in mind. He came back in the Quinjet when Tony called him and told him there was a situation.

When he landed, he saw each of his friends fighting something. It was easy enough to realize that they were all fighting a nightmare. Worse than when Wanda had gotten into their heads. Steve wanted to tell them all to stop fighting their own and start fighting each other’s, but then he saw Bucky’s nightmare. Saw his own uniform, an image of himself fighting with Bucky. 

Steve had killed a lot of people in his lifetime. It’s what he was made for, designed for. Not to be a good man. To be a man filled with anger and fear and self-loathing. He hadn’t been hit by whatever was controlling the nightmares. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, since it seemed like his nightmare was made manifest.

He flung the shield with all of his might. He watched it connect. He watched it decapitate the man who was causing all of this. He watched his body fall, watched the head tumble off the shield as it came back to Steve, caught it on the edge and was unsure if the blood on his palm was from the other man or from the shield digging into his own skin.

He got back on the Quinjet and didn’t say a word to anyone on the way back to the Tower.

**

It shouldn’t be so easy to avoid someone you live with. To be a ghost in your own life. Back before the war and the ice, he’d known Bucky wasn’t his soulmate. He prepared himself for the day Bucky came home all flushed with excitement and news that he’d found the one.

It never came. And if Steve rubbed the web of his thumb after the Vita-Ray machine, no one seemed to notice. He’d been prepared back then. But after everything, he’d thought Bucky’s life had bypassed whoever he was supposed to be with. Thought it had to be someone who’d already lived and died.

Instead the purple-black hourglass stood out on his pale skin here and now. 

One morning Bucky had walked into the kitchen, looking rough and tired. But happy. He’d looked happy, and Steve noticed that Bucky was wearing what he’d worn yesterday. Steve gave him a smile and a nod and edged past him. He wanted the solitude of his room. The solitude of somewhere else. 

Of the ice.

**

“It’s not my fault.”

Steve started, spinning away from the window and looking over at Bucky. He was standing in the kitchen hallway, leaning against the wall and looking at Steve. Steve nodded. “I know.”

“It’s not hers either. Neither of us asked for this.”

“I know.”

“You’re acting like we did it on purpose.”

“I want you to be happy. I guess I just didn’t expect it.”

“Come over to her place tonight. Have dinner.”

“No. I don’t think I can do that.”

“Please, Steve?” Bucky didn't ask him for much because he knew Steve couldn’t say no. “You know it’s important, or I wouldn’t ask.”

Steve nodded and sighed, turning back to the window. “What time?”

“Seven.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

**

He sat on the couch in the same place he had been when he’d told Natasha. He wondered if any of this would have happened if he’d kept his mouth shut. But Steve had never been able to deny Bucky anything, even at his own expense. 

“Is this about how things are going to change?” He wanted to get this over with. Wanted to cut the cords and invisible threads that held them all in stasis so everyone can go forward. “You’ll move in here? Have her six?” That one hurt the most of all. But loyalty and friendship couldn’t trump destiny. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to get in the way.”

Natasha sighed and got off the chair, moving around to sit next to Steve. She reached out and put her hand on his knee, thumb swiping slow circles against it. “Sometimes I wonder how it’s possible for someone to be so smart and such a fucking idiot.”

“And now verbal abuse.” He tried for a smile and failed miserably. “At least that hasn’t changed.”

Natasha sighed again and glanced over at Bucky who was leaning against a wall, watching them with sniper’s eyes. “You love him, right?”

“I can’t do this.” Steve stood up and started toward the door, and then Bucky was in front of him before Steve even realized he’d moved. “Get out of the way, Buck.”

He shook his head. “Can’t do that. Need you to listen to her. Answer her.”

“Why?” He didn’t recognize his voice. It hurt, felt too tight in his chest. He felt concave and wounded, small like he used to be. 

Bucky took Steve’s shoulders and turned him around. Natasha was sitting on the coffee table, her shirt off and her back to him. Bucky guided him forward until there was no way Steve could mistake the symbols on either side of her spine. A knife on one side, and he knew without knowing that it couldn’t be anyone but Bucky.

But on the other side was the dark blue outline of a star. Bucky touched the back of Steve’s arm. “Touch it.”

Steve shook his head, but reached out anyway, fingers brushing over the edges. Something sang up his spine and only Bucky’s grip kept him from falling to his knees. He lowered him down and Steve looked up at him, more scared and more confused than he’d ever been.

“I don’t…”

Natasha stroked his jaw then turned his head. Bucky had his shirt stripped off now, the same star in the same spot next to his spine. Steve’s hand shook as he reached out. Just the tip of the star against his fingertip felt like fire in his blood. 

“I don’t…”

“We think the serum won’t let your skin hold a mark,” Bucky said softly as he turned back to face him. “Mine is the discount version, so my body can. They’re fainter than hers though. But they’re still there. Here.” Bucky touches Steve lightly against the chest. 

“I had one. It was...It was…” It had been vague in his memory, something dark and blotchy. But thinking about it, the shape coalesced into something that made sense. Wishful thinking or a knife bisecting an hourglass?

Bucky touched the web of Steve’s thumb and heat flooded through him, made him dizzy. Natasha’s fingers joined his and his world flew apart.

**

“I’m not moving in with you,” Natasha said. “Boys are disgusting. I don’t care if you’re a deadly assassin and the captain of all virtue. Your socks stink, you jerk off in the shower, and neither of you have a bed big enough for three.”

“That could be arranged,” Steve reminded her.”Besides, your place is too small.”

“And you’re still disgusting boys. So you live here, I live there, and everything else we share.”

“No. Not everything else,” Bucky protested. “I can only handle one of us having no sense of self-preservation and an overwhelming amount of stupidity -- which is what it is, Rogers, even if it does usually manage to work out in your favor.”

“Okay. So we share most things.” Natasha walked over and sat in Steve’s lap, stretching her legs out so they were on Bucky’s. Steve put a hand in the small of her back, absently stroking his thumb over both of her marks. Natasha shivered. “Like my bed.”

“Rogers,” Bucky rolled his eyes as Steve’s hand slid around his back so he could touch his mark on Bucky too. “You’re in-fucking-satiable.”

“Funny,” Steve laughed. “When we’re in bed, I don’t hear either of you complaining.”


End file.
